David D. Lyons Photography

HDR photos are like anchovies on a pizza; you either love them or you hate them. Entire books have been written on the technical definition of what an HDR shot portrays, but I will simply defer to this summary from Wikipedia:

“HDR processing is a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to more accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight.”

I use HDR to add realism to my photos rather than (over)processing to the point that seems to raise the hackles on photographic purists’ necks. I like the artistic photos as long as they are portrayed as such, and the photographer doesn’t try to pass them off as untouched. For example, the shot below is a great example of a shot I processed with more of what some refer to as a “painterly” effect (allright, I may have overdone it, but you get the point!):

Now, this is not to say that you can’t spot an HDR shot in a crowd because you certainly can. I believe that it better represents what my eyes are actually seeing in the moment, and therefore provides a better lens for viewing the artist’s vision. For example, the picture at the top of this post is a shot I took from just off the gondola in Telluride, CO. There was a storm coming through at sunset, and the sky was an amazing shade of red. The problem with a conventionally taken shot in this situation was that there was no detail in the trees when I exposed for the blue of the sky, or there was no color and contrast in the sky had I exposed for the trees. HDR allowed me to take multiple exposures, in this case 5 separate exposures, at 0EV, +1EV, -1EV, +2EV, and -2EV, and fuse them together in a software program that allows me to map the best of each into a single image. This is certainly not to say that a beautiful shot could not have been captured conventionally. I simply believe that I was better able to capture and present the image using this method. Further, I have begun to see shots through an HDR lens in my head, and that has been a been a paradigm shift for me as a photographer. In the same way a photographer can look at a scene and see the black and white image possibilities, I am able to see the HDR possibilities.

In my next series of posts, I will provide an overview of my HDR process, workflow, tools, and techniques.